OSCMS: XML, Mashups and Drupal-as-Platform

So OSCMS is over. My session on getting external data into Drupal went pretty well. You may grab a PDF version of the presentation.

The main points are basically:

  • You don’t need to batch import data into Drupal as long as users can find what they want
  • “Lazy instantiation” is great for dealing with large data sets
  • Drupal supports several methods of lazy instantiation
  • Cache aggressively to reduce network latency
  • Pipes is very cool.

In all, I think you’ll find that Drupal can be a powerful integration framework, if you examine the APIs.

4 Comments so far
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Very much appreciated your presentation. Much food for thought.

Thanks for the slides. Unfortunately, I missed your presentation at OSCMS. I noticed a call to json_decode() which is in php >= 5.2 … do you include a JSON library in your code or are you just running php 5 or did you roll your own replacement?

Scott-

I’m running PHP 5.1.6 on localhost, using the packages provided by Marc Linyage for OS X. Obviously, he included the json PECL library in his distro.

If this were a “real” release, we’d have two options:

1) Provide a PHP 4 / 5 parser for those without json support.

2) Follow Rasmus’ plea at OSCMS, and make PHP 5.2 required for use of the module.

Cool. I’m all for going to php5. I think this will be an easiy sell once Debian (the convervative distro) Etch goes stable w/ php5 included… At that point, there’s no real argument against supporting it in any hosted environment, IMO.

I’m mixed on whether contrib modules should really require php5 until core does … but I guess that’s up to the maintainers. :)



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